


Comfort

by kafrickinboom



Series: Voltron WLW Month [16]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Fluff, Galra Keith (Voltron), Genderbending, Hunk (Voltron) is so Pure, Pre-Relationship, VLD WLW Month, Voltron WLW Month 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 01:12:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11818086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kafrickinboom/pseuds/kafrickinboom
Summary: Looking down at her hands, Kath feels the panic start to creep in. They’re turning purple. And not due to circulation issues. (She would almost prefer the potential hand loss over this.)





	Comfort

**Author's Note:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> Language note:  
> Tinamatua - Samoan for "Grandmother"

Looking down at her hands, Kath feels the panic start to creep in. They’re turning  _ purple. _ And not due to circulation issues. (She would almost prefer the potential hand loss over this.)

After learning about her heritage, after activating her blade, after coming into such close contact with other Galra, something triggered her body to shift. Coran says it’s normal since she’s been practically breathing in the Galra pheromones they naturally give off since joining the team. He says that it doesn’t shock him, the fact that after 18 years of no Galra contact, that the sharp increase in interactions, added to the stress of her current occupation, has flipped her genetic switch.

She’s been locked away in her room since she noticed the sclera of her eyes taking on a yellow hue. That was two days ago, and nothing she’s tried has done anything to stop it- not that she has many options of things  _ to _ do to try. Mostly it was just her trying to will away the transformation, to stop her cells from morphing from more human to more Galra. 

She fucking  _ hates _ this. She hates everything she sees in the mirror. She hates her yellowed eyes around her bright violet irises. She hates the sheer amount of  _ fur _ growing on the sides of her face, on her body. She hates the ears that have started growing in, blindingly painful as her skin stretches out to accommodate the new additions to her appearance. She hates the shades of purples splotching up on her skin so much that she currently looks like the surface of Callisto. She hates the claws that are beginning to take shape, her once short nails, thickening, lengthening, sharpening to fine points like ten little built-in weapons ready to rend flesh and armor alike. She hates the shift in her fucking teeth. Her  _ teeth. _ Now they’re longer at the canines and lateral incisors, sharper, more animal-like.

She doesn’t even know how the others would react. The only person she’s seen since her self-imposed isolation is Coran, and while she knows the others are concerned, she just can’t deal. She couldn’t go out there knowing full well that they would all look at her differently- Shiro because she’s part of the race that abducted and experimented on him, Pidge because she's part of the race that may still have their brother and father in captivity doing gods know what, Lance because she’s a fucking monster and he would never let go of an opportunity to fuck with her because of it, and Hunk…

Hunk would be terrified of her. She’d put on the bravest face she possibly could, but Kath can already imagine the shakiness of Hunk’s smile, the tension in every line of her body, the suspicious side-eyeing when she thinks Kath isn’t looking, the flinching if Kath got too close. Kath doesn’t know if she can handle it if, because of her sudden shift in appearance, the girl she’s been harboring feelings for for ages suddenly starts to  _ hate her. _

So, for the first time probably ever, she hides rather than fights. She sequesters herself away rather than walking out there with her head high and no fucks given. 

Maybe once this transformation is complete, she’ll have built up the nerve to let the others in.

\---

Hunk is starting to get worried. She hasn’t seen Kath in- what? Four days now? Something like that. Far too long.

The others aren’t too worried about it since Kath had taken to “going emo” (as Lance calls it), locking herself up in her room and angsting for days on end. Even Shiro said that he wouldn’t worry too much until the full week mark since he apparently already spoke with her earlier. Besides, she’s eaten every meal Hunk has left for her outside her door, so clearly they shouldn’t be freaking out too badly, right? Wrong.

It seems like no one else saw the panic written all over Kath the day before she retreated to her room. Hunk hates thinking back on the downturned lips and wide, distressed eyes refusing to meet anyone else for more than a second. She hates thinking that something is wrong and she’s doing nothing but waiting for Kath to decide to be okay. 

_ Screw this, _ she thinks as she prepares Kath’s plate after yet another absence from dinner. 

She knocks on the door and stays put rather than leaving like normal, allowing Kath her breathing room and space she claimed she needed. Hunk cannot, in good conscious, let the woman she lo- her  _ friend- _ suffer whatever the hell she’s suffering alone, regardless of what the others have to say about it. They might be content to just not offering to help, but Hunk can’t. She just can’t.

The door cracks open, and Hunk only sees a flash of purple and yellow before the door is slammed shut, an uncharacteristic squeak sounding from Kath’s lips. 

Hunk stands there with the plate, eyes wide with shock and confusion, trying to figure out just what the hell she just saw. If she didn’t know any better, she’d say she saw a-a  _ Galra. _ What? Just... _ what? _

She knocks on Kath’s door again, her raps more insistent. “Kath? Are you okay? What’s going on?”

“I’m, I’m fine, Hunk. Ah, nothing’s going on. Ju-just leave the food, please,” Kath responds, but Hunk can hear the slurring in her speech that wasn’t there just a few days ago. 

“Come on. I know you’re lying. You only stutter when you do.” Hunk says, glaring a hole in the door like she could burn through it if she just thought hard enough. “Let me in. I wanna help you.”

“There’s nothing to help!” Kath says, her tone sounding more distressed as she talked. “I wish there was something you could do, but you just… You just can’t! This isn’t something fixable.” And if Hunk wasn’t listening so closely, she would have missed the low, “I wish you could fix me.”

Hunk stands there, her glare falling into a concerned frown. “Let me in. Please.”

“Hunk, I don’t- I don’t think that’s a good idea. You  _ really _ don’t want to see me like this.”

“Try me.”

A frustrated sigh, a whisper of the door opening, a clawed  _ (clawed?!) _ grip and a tug later, Hunk is in Kath’s room. The air rushed from her lungs as she gaped at the woman in front of her. 

Kath is- Hunk shakes her head at what she’s seeing. Kath looks like a Galra. An honest-to-gods  _ Galra. _ Her basic facial features are all the same, but her color palette is decidedly more...purple. Her hair looks much thicker (but also looks somehow softer?) and covers her new, adorable  _ (what the hell) _ ears. Her hands wring in front of her as Hunk looks down Kath’s new(?) body, her nails much longer than Hunk has ever seen them, down to her nervously shifting feet, and when Hunk looks back up into Kath’s eyes, the air rushes back in her lungs in the form of a gasp.

Hunk can confidently say she’s never seen Kath cry before, but here she is, her pansy-palette eyes filling with tears, fear battling her desire to look unaffected. And just like that, Hunk is setting the plate on the nearest flat surface and pulling Kath into her arms.

Kath goes so stiff in her arms, she can’t help but think it’s painful. Hunk just squeezes tighter, huffing a laugh when Kath’s new ears bat at the side of her face. Slowly,  _ so slowly, _ Kath relaxes, muscle by muscle until she hesitantly wraps her arms around Hunk. Hunk swallows at the slight scratch of Kath’s claws through her shirt, but she's honestly surprised that she’s not freaking out more.

Hunk is fully self-aware. She knows her anxiety is something to be reckoned with, and she knows she’s pretty damn sensitive to big changes. Something like this should have her two steps from a panic, but...it’s  _ Kath. _

Hell  _ yeah, _ this is going to take some time to get used to, but everything from her voice to her stubbornness to the way she holds herself to those violet-amethyst eyes are all the same. If she was a threat, she would’ve let Hunk in from the first request, and she would have attacked by now, but even that line of thought doesn’t even compute. Kath? A threat? It didn’t mesh in her mind, more like oil and water than anything that made sense.

Kath is shaking. She’s  _ shaking, _ and it hurts Hunk in the worst of ways that she was so terrified of her reaction that she’s like  _ this _ over it. Hunk shushes Kath gently, her grip shifting to Kath’s middle-back and the back of her neck, toying with the hair at the base, reveling in how soft it is.

“Are you trying to get me to dance like a middle schooler?” Kath huffs a shaky laugh, and abruptly Hunk is aware that she’s been rocking Kath side to side like her  _ tinamatua _ used to do when she comforted Hunk. She’s not even going to let herself be embarrassed by it. Hunk’s fairly sure Kath hasn’t been this calm since pre-isolation.

She hums, “maybe. Do you want to dance with me?”

If her ear wasn’t so close to Kath’s mouth, Hunk might have missed the quiet, little gasp before Kath cleared her throat. “Are you asking?”

Hunk snorted, pulling back just enough to smile down at Kath. “I believe I just did, yeah.”

Kath rolled her eyes, a bashful smile edging on her own lips as she shook her head. “Maybe some other time. I’m not feeling so good right now.” And like that, the tiny flame of Kath’s happiness and relaxation went out. She looked up at Hunk, confused. “Why are you so cool with this? I thought you’d be running from the room, screaming by now.”

“You’re still you.” Hunk shrugged. It really was that easy.

“It can’t be that easy.” Leave it to Kath to immediately negate Hunk’s positivity.

“Okay, we’re cuddling.” 

“W- _ what?!” _ Kath sputtered, her cheeks deepening to an interesting red-violet shade that made Hunk bite down on the inside of her cheek to quell the coo building up in her.

“If you don’t want to, we don’t have to, but I just kind of, uh, figured it would help?” Hunk winces at the uncertainty in her tone. She knows  _ she _ wants this, of course, and she knows it probably won’t mean much to Kath, but that doesn’t seem to be a deterrent to Hunk’s dual desire to make everything better and also be pressed against Kath’s body. 

Kath bites her lip, eyes staring into the middle distance in contemplation before shrugging, turning and laying down in her bed, looking like a wooden plank rather than a living, breathing person. Hunk slips in beside her, laying her head on Kath’s tense shoulder until, like the hug, she relaxes into it. 

“I thought you’d hate me,” Kath admits, a trembling whisper in the otherwise silent room.

“There wasn’t even a chance of that ever being true,” Hunk replies, her tone brooking no argument. “You have to know the others will love you just as you are too. It might take them a bit of time to adjust, but like I said before, you’re still you. I don’t know the exact specifics on why you look like a Galra now, but it probably has something to do with all those meetings with Coran, right?”

Kath sighs, “you always were too observant for your own good, but yes. Turns out I’m half-Galra.” 

Hunk is silent for a minute as she processes that. That makes the most logical sense, of course, but she didn’t even know it was possible to be only half-human. She supposes she never really thought about genetic possibilities with any of the alien races out here, but it makes sense that at least one of them would be compatible with humans. 

She turns toward Kath, absently tracing patterns on the strip of skin peeking out from under Kath’s ridden-up shirt. “That explains this. How do you feel about it?”

Kath gives her a flat look. “How do you think I feel?”

Hunk shrugs her free shoulder. “Well, you also have to know that just because you’re half-Gala doesn’t immediately mean you're the enemy, right?”

Kath’s silence is telling. 

“You’re  _ not. _ By the gods, you haven’t been thinking so all this time, have you?”

“I don’t know.” Kath closes her eyes against Hunk’s incredulity.

“Okay, will  _ I _ know you’re not, and so will the rest of the team, so you need to start working on getting rid of that thought now.” Hunk frowns. She scoots up, slipping her arm under Kath’s neck, pulling her in until she’s curled around Hunk. Hunk swallows thickly as Kath immediately octopuses around her.

“Thank you.” Kath murmurs, and Hunk hugs her tighter.

“Anytime. You know that I’m always going to be here for you.” She allows herself to nuzzle into Kath’s fluffy hair in affection, runs her fingers over Kath’s arm comfortingly. “Do you want me to stay?”

“Please.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! <3
> 
> Next up: f!Shance, "Music"


End file.
